Once upon an early- to mid-20th-century time, Madeira was a Place To Be, frequented famously by Winston Churchill and a preferred redoubt of a coterie of continental aristocracy drawn by the Atlantic island’s eternal-spring climate and spectacular landscapes.

The hotel foyer

This month Churchill’s favoured haunt – the vaunted Belmond Reid’s Palace (belmond.com; from €430), once a grande dame of European hotels that had faded into semi-obscurity – is emerging from a rolling renovation that’s brought it into the 21st century with its grandeur entirely intact, with striking monochrome chevron marble floors and potted lemon trees in the lobby, and a cliffside pool terrace restaurant, open from 7am to 8pm, that’s a postcard waiting to happen). Like the Palace, Madeira itself seems to be on something of a rebound; call it the Portugal effect.